by Greg Bear
These things done, Edward became what he wanted to be, footloose and fancy free.
He had few doubts that the Earth would soon come to an end. He had bought a small-caliber pistol in case that end might prove too painful. (Pistols were at a premium now.) He had apportioned his savings and the government money to allow him a full five months of travel.
He had no urge to step outside the boundaries of the United States. Purchasing a small motor home (trading in his Land Cruiser) had depleted his assets by about a third. Now, for his final day in Austin, he was spending the night in the hotel, wrapped in a peculiarly enervated melancholy.
He was anxious to get moving.
He would travel around the country, and in late March or April he would end up in Yosemite, where he would settle in. The first part of his journey would give him a great overview of North America, as much as he could cover—something he had always wanted to do. He would spend a few weeks in the White River Badlands of South Dakota, a few days in Zion National Park, and so on, hitting the geological highlights until by full circle he came back to his childhood and the high rocky walls of Yosemite. Having surveyed some of what he wanted to see of the Earth, he would then begin to catalog his interior country.
Good plans.
Then why did he feel so miserable?
He could not shake free of the notion that one spent one's life with a treasured friend or loved one. Edward had always been essentially a loner. He felt no need to see his mother; she had kicked him out of the house at sixteen, and he had lost touch with her years ago. But there was still the myth, the image of the dyadic cyclone, as John Lilly had called it . . . the pair, facing life together.
He finished the whiskey sour and left the bar, brushing salt dust from his hand with the screwing motion of a bunched-up napkin. The doorman nodded cordially at him and he nodded back. Then he went for a two-hour walk around downtown Austin, something he had not done since he had been a student.
It was Sunday and the town was quiet. He wandered past white picket fences and black iron fences surrounding old well-kept historic houses. He studied bronze historical plaques mounted on pillars. Leaving the older neighborhoods, he finally stood in the center of concrete and stone and steel and glass pillars, the balmy midwinter Texas breeze rippling his short-sleeved shirt.
A human city, yet very solid and substantial-looking.
How could it just go away?
Not even geology encompassed the instant demise of worlds.
The next morning, having slept soundly enough and with no memorable dreams, Edward Shaw began his new life.
45
December 24
Lieutenant Colonel Rogers sat in his trailer, waiting for word from the civilian liaison, a small, dapper saintly faced NSA man named Tucker. Tucker had but one role in this conspiracy—there was no other word for it—and that was to convey whether or not the weapon had been acquired.
The Sunday New York Times lay spread across a desk below three blank television monitors. On the front page, three headlines of almost equal size vied for attention:
PRESIDENTIAL CRONY ASSASSINATED
Reverend Ormandy Shot by Lone Gunman in New Orleans
CROCKERMAN VETOES ALIEN DEFENSE ACT
FORGE OF GODDERS GATHER TO "PROTECT" ALIEN CRAFT
Gathering of England-Based Cultists in California
The whole world was going mad, and taking him along, in the past week, he had three times violated his oath as an officer. He was participating in a conspiracy that would ultimately subvert the expressed orders of the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Within two weeks, sooner if all went as planned, he would attempt to destroy the very object the cultists surrounding the site wished to protect.
What disturbed him most of all was that he was not more disturbed. He hated to think of himself as a hardened radical, but he had indeed been radicalized, and he was no longer able to see and think of opposite courses of action. All he could see was a threat to his nation and a government in complete disarray. Extraordinary times, extraordinary measures.
The trailer phone rang. He answered and the command center operator told him he had an outside call from CINCPACFLEET—Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet.
Tucker's voice came on the line. He was, more than likely, calling from the aircraft carrier Saratoga operating a hundred miles due west of San Clemente Island. He had, more than likely, just finished speaking with Admiral Louis Cameron.
"Colonel Rogers, we have an arrow and all the feathers we need."
"Yes."
"Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"Your next contact will be Green."
"Thank you."
He hung up the phone. Green was Senator Julio Gilmonn, Democrat, California. Gilmonn was chairman of the Senate Alien Defense Subcommittee. He would ride in a big limousine through the cordon of cultists and onto the site in approximately ten days. He would be heavily guarded.
In the trunk of the limousine would be the "arrow," a three-kiloton warhead originally designed for an anti-submarine missile aboard the Saratoga.
Carrying this warhead in a custom sling, Rogers would enter the bogey.
He folded the newspaper neatly and stood to make his afternoon rounds.
PERSPECTIVE
CBS Daylight News,
January 1, 1997,
Hosts Tricia Revere and Alan Hack:
Revere: Were you in Times Square or watching it on TV?
Hack: TV. I value my life.
Revere: I've never seen anything like it. An absolute frenzy.
Hack: They think it's our last year on Earth. (Shakes his head at comment off camera) The hell with that. Let's be real. They do. So they're going to party.
46
January 3, 1997
The wonder of it was that Arthur still felt like a private individual. He had driven Marty through drizzling rain to school, in a fit of parental solicitude—the school bus was perfectly adequate and stopped less than fifty yards from the front door. Returning, while parking in the carport, he had heard distant voices, some speaking English, most not. He had sat in the car with eyes closed, listening as if he were on some ham radio or satellite dish connection, but the voices had stopped, replaced only by a humming expectancy.
He had walked into the house, removing his overcoat. Francine had met him with a cup of hot cocoa. His eyes misting, he had sipped the cocoa, put it down on the kitchen counter, and hugged her. She had moved against him with more and more enthusiasm, verging on desperation, and he had led her into the bedroom, where they had made love.
He had not been "watched."
When not carrying out specific tasks, he was as free— within rational limits—as anybody he knew. He would not even contemplate leaving his zone of activity, the northwestern area of the United States. And if he tried to do so, he would be prevented. But there was plenty of work to do here, and more would be coming later on . . .
He lay with his head on his wife's ample tummy, hand around one breast, dozing lightly. She curled a lock of his hair in one finger and watched him with that womanly calmness he had so often marveled at. There had been passion, even obsession, in their bed that morning, yet now she was as placid as a crockery madonna.
He could tell her about the spider. Nothing would prevent him. He lifted his head and was about to speak, but then stopped. So who's in charge? Is it me, hesitating, or something else? It was him. She had enough to think about without learning her husband was possessed. That word amused and irritated him. It did not describe what was happening . . .
Why don't they take her, too? Possess her?
Because they didn't need her, and their resources were limited. Suddenly his spine tingled and his neck tightened. Only one or two thousand . . . What if nobody in his family was among that chosen group? None of his friends, colleagues, acquaintances? What if he was not?
"Something wrong, Art?" she asked, stroking his forehead.
&
nbsp; He shook his head and caressed her nipple.
"You make me feel like something other than a mother and PTA member," she said. "You should be ashamed of yourself."
"Oh, I am," he said. "Thoroughly."
The rain gusted against the windows and a cold wind howled under the eaves. Ominous, patently ominous, yet it made him feel safe and warm. He could lie nude beside his woman in an enclosed warm bedroom and feel himself a master of infinite space. His body did not yet understand.
A network was being formed. Abruptly, he knew that libraries were being raided in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. What was their scheme? Would they literally pluck up the Sistine Chapel and disks of Bach and the entirety of the Parthenon or Angkor Wat and lift them into space, along with the geniuses of Earth? Somehow, that seemed obvious and very naive.
He had listened many times to Harry's "essay" on the tape. Ever since, he had been mulling it over, comparing Harry's ideas with what the nascent network was relaying to him.
In his head, a concept more than a word: grammars.
Hooked to that concept was a maze of connotations: grammar of a planet's ecosystem, from genetic material on up, how the species fit together as "words" in a "book," the structure of evolving plots and the implications for a denouement . . .
Grammar of society, how human groups interact as part of the overall ecosystem . . .
Fruit, gonads, a planet's reproductive system, a fertile pseudopod reaching up into space away from the surface and having to learn Jesus Jesus.
To learn about deep vacuum and gravitation and the wind between worlds, the ecosystem of Earth must evolve an "organ" or arm equipped with perception and logic, just as life had once adapted to the land by developing certain kinds of eyes and limbs and neurological structures. Sentences in Earth's book using the syntax of land-walking, space-walking, all implied by the original ecosystem grammar, all inherent. As on a thousand other worlds with similar living grammars. Humans were the Earth's organ for crossing between worlds and stars.
They speak Life. They know what to take to keep the essence, the basic meaning, of the planet intact.
That was what he was being told. Harry had said, on the tape,
"I’ve spent twenty years of my life as a biologist. You, Arthur, kept me up to date in other disciplines; you got my mind working fifteen years ago when you gave me Lovelock's book on 'Gaia.' Recent events have made me dig out some of my own old theories and speculations, made after reading Lovelock and Margulis. We've talked about them, off and on, but I was never so sure of myself that I put them down on paper. Now I'm pretty sure, but I'm too weak to put them on paper, so . . . this.
"Gaia is the entire Earth, and she's come alive, she's been an organic whole, a single creature, for over two billion years now. We can't make complete analogies between Gaia and human beings, or dogs or cats or birds, because until recently we've never studied actual independent organisms. Dogs and cats and birds—and humans— are not independent. We are bits and pieces of Gaia. So is every other living thing on the Earth. Imagine a single cell trying to make analogies between its cytoplasm and organelles, and the role it plays in a human body; it's going to be misled if it compares too rigidly.
"So Gaia, the Earth, is the first independent organism we've studied. I'll call her a 'planetism.' A planetism is made up of plants and animals and microorganisms, and these are made up of cells, or are themselves cells. Cells are made up of cytoplasm and organelles and so on. An organism regulates itself with hormones, neurotransmitters, and it does its work and gets its nutrition with enzymes and other substances . . . all organized, on schedule, synergistic. Self-controlled.
"Gaia does her work with ecosystems. Like any organism, a planetism has a schedule and certain goals to meet. She grows and develops and goes through different stages in her life. Sometimes she undergoes radical shifts, destroying whole ecosystems. Maybe she's experimenting in ways that smaller organisms cannot; she reaches a dead end, clears some of the slate, and starts over. I don't know. But ultimately she has to do what all living things do— mature and reproduce.
"How can a planetism make others like herself? She came into being—probably—without outside interference, though maybe she's the offspring of another planetism. Maybe life was seeded here a long, long time ago. I don't think so, frankly. I think most planetisms have no parents, at least not right now, and so they're free to develop on their own schedule. This takes a long, long time, but eventually she finds a way to reproduce. She develops a reproductive strategy.
"The planetism has found ways to use more and more of her raw materials and surface area. She dominated the oceans, then spread plants and animals out to conquer the barren continents. These plants and animals had somehow become specially suited to life on land. I suspect more than random chance was at work, but I'm too weak to argue about that now. It's irrelevant to my scheme.
' "Now, after ages, humans are here, and we're not doing too badly. We've got an organ as important as the legs on an amphibian—a highly developed brain. Suddenly, Gaia is becoming self-aware, and looking outward. She's developing eyes that can look far into space and begin to understand the environment she has to conquer. She's reaching puberty. Soon she's going to reproduce.
"I know you're way ahead of me now. You're saying, 'That means human beings are the Earth's gonads.' And I am saying that, but the analogy is weak at best. In time, Gaia would probably have sacrificed everything on Earth —all her ecosystems—to promote human beings. Because we're more than gonads. We are the makers of spores and seeds, we are the ones who understand what Gaia is, and we will soon know how to make other worlds come alive. We will carry Gala's biological information out into space, on spaceships.
"You know, this idea puts a lot of problems in perspective. Gaia has nurtured us, but she has also goaded us, and sometimes tormented us. She's used all of her resources to make sure we don't feel too comfortable. Diseases that used to help regulate ecosystems have suddenly become stimulants. We're working hard to control all the diseases that harm us, and in doing so, we're understanding life itself, and coming to understand Gaia. So Gaia uses diseases to stimulate and instruct. Is it any real coincidence, you think, that in the twentieth century, we've been hit by so many retrovirus and immune system epidemics? We can't solve these epidemics without understanding life to the nth degree. Gaia is regulating us, regulating herself, making herself ready for puberty.
"Because that's what would have happened. Gaia would have sent us out, and we would have carried her within our spaceships. Maybe we would have made Earth unlivable, and that would be one more reason to leave the seed pod, because it's all dead and shriveled. But that would only be natural: Maybe we would have preserved Earth and gone outward. It's like the dilemma for parents who either make life a hell for their kids to get them out, or the kids have enough gumption to get out on their own, to break loose. Not that I know these problems firsthand, as a parent. . . but I remember being a kid.
"Of course, Gaia isn't the only planetism. There are probably billions of others, some of them part of seeding networks—planetisms with parents. Some are independent. And when they get out into the galaxy, they find they are in competition. Suddenly they're part of an even larger, much more complex system—a galactic ecology. Planetisms and their extensions—intelligences, technological civilizations— then develop strategies to compete, and to eliminate competition.
"Some planetisms take the obvious route. They exploit and try to spread rapidly. They're like parasites, or young diseases that haven't learned how to live harmlessly within a host. Other planetisms react by seeking and destroying the extensions of these parasites. Eventually, I suppose, if the galaxy itself is to come alive—become a 'galactism'—it's going to have to knit together the extensions of all its planetisms, put them in order. So the parasites either fit in and contribute or they are eliminated. But in the meantime, it's a jungle out there.
"You talked to me a long while back about
Frank Drinkwater. Drinkwater, and others like him, have maintained for years that there is no other intelligent life in our galaxy. He claims that the lack of radio signals from distant stars provides the proof. He also thought the lack of von Neumann machines confirmed that we are alone. He was too impatient. Now, obviously, he's wrong.
"We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten.
"I'm just about done now. Too tired to elaborate. Maybe you've already thought this through. Maybe you can find it useful, anyway.
"You've been my own goad and barb sometimes, Art. Thank you for that. You are my very dear friend, and I love you.
"Take care of Ithaca, as much as she needs it.
"My love to Francine and Marty, too.
"I hope and pray you all make it, though for the life of me, I can't figure out how."
Harry had known, almost by instinct. He was still alive, hanging on in Los Angeles, too weak to do much besides sleep. Arthur suddenly felt a panic at the thought of a world without him. What would he do? Now, more than ever, Harry was necessary ...
"Art," Francine said. He tried to relax and brought his gaze down from the ceiling, to her face. "Are you thinking about Harry?"
He nodded. "But that's not all." Without considering the consequences, moving ahead on an instinct he hoped was as good as Harry's, he had made up his mind. "There's something big going on," he said. "I've been afraid to tell you."
"Can you tell me?" she asked, squinting as if reluctant to hear. Enough change, enough shock in the news without it coming into her house any more than it already had.